History

Robert Lowell




History has to live with what was here,clutching and close to fumbling all we had--it is so dull and gruesome how we die,unlike writing, life never finishes.Abel was finished; death is not remote,a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,his baby crying all night like a new machine.As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter's moon ascends--a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose--O there's a terrifying innocence in my facedrenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.